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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Channeling Bob Marley and Bob Dylan, Wyclef Jean (Howard Dean's favorite musician) is saving hip-hop from its purgatory of bling-bling and booty.
Jun 3, 2004 | Wyclef Jean is not a great rapper, a stellar singer or a humble self-promoter ("I want to do things that will change people who hear it 300 years from now, like Scriptures," he recently told MTV). That he's favored by two former presidential hopefuls -- Al Gore, who gave Jean a public "shout-out" in 2000, and Howard Dean, who deemed him "fantastic" -- doesn't bode well: Any act deemed fit for political endorsement is likely to be as cutting-edge as warm milk.
Jean's excruciatingly righteous new single, "If I Was President," released via AOL Music, isn't likely to boost his hardcore hip-hop credibility, either. "If I was president," the rapper begins, "instead of spending billions on the war/ I'd take that money so I could feed the poor." The well-intentioned, musically bereft track has the feel of a grade-school writing assignment -- "what would you do if you were president, Billy?" -- and AOL has, aptly enough, turned it into one: Fans are invited to add their own "If I Was President" declarations to an online message board; winning entries will be incorporated into a remix of the original Jean song.
I recently heard an industry rumor, though, that amounted to a challenge: Spend some hours with Jean at his Platinum Sounds studio and try to emerge without being converted to the belief that this utterly imperfect artist -- heavy on political correctness, light on hit songs -- is one of the greatest acts in hip-hop history.
That challenge, combined with an interest in his most recent album, "The Preacher's Son," landed me at Jean's midtown Manhattan studio on a chilly New York afternoon. Jean, sporting slack jeans and an Expos jersey, shakes my hand vigorously. Then his cellphone rings. He flicks it open. "Jonathan Demme!" he sings to the voice on the other end. Jean, 31, considers Demme, the Brooklyn-reared director, his "adopted father." The pair recently worked on "The Agronomist," a documentary about a murdered activist in Haiti for which Jean -- raised in Haiti and known for being outspoken about the politics there -- composed the musical score.
"Yeah, we're at 60,000 a week," Jean says into his phone. "But you know Clive -- he ain't gonna stop until it's a million." "Clive," of course, is legendary music mogul Clive Davis, now head of J Records; "60,000 a week" refers to "The Preacher's Son," Jean's J Records debut and his fourth solo album.
"It's all good," Jean continues. "It's moving like a Wyclef Jean record -- a longevity type of thing."
A Wyclef Jean record does not, after all, move like a record by the Fugees, the group Jean launched with Lauryn Hill and Prakazrel Michel (aka Pras) during his high school years in New Jersey. In 1996, the Fugees released one of the most artistically and commercially successful hip-hop albums of all time, "The Score," which has sold more than 16 million to date.
After the Fugees broke up, Hill released an opus, "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill"; Pras released little worth noting; Jean released a bit of both, launching a career that's spotty, persistent and ultimately hard to pin down.
